The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: Novel Excerpt

It happened for the first time on a Tuesday afternoon, a warm spring day in the flatlands near Hollywood, a light breeze moving east from the ocean and stirring the black-eyed pansy petals newly planted in our flower boxes.

My mother was home, baking me a cake. When I tripped up the walkway, she opened the front door before I could knock.

How about a practice round? she said, leaning past the door frame. She pulled me in for a hello hug, pressing me close to my favorite of her aprons, the worn cotton one trimmed in sketches of twinned red cherries.

On the kitchen counter, she’d set out the ingredients: Flour bag, sugar box, two brown eggs nestled in the grooves between tiles. A yellow block of butter blurring at the edges. A shallow glass bowl of lemon peel. I toured the row. This was the week of my ninth birthday, and it had been a long day at school of cursive lessons, which I hated, and playground yelling about point scoring, and the sunlit kitchen and my warm-eyed mother were welcome arms, open. I dipped a finger into the wax baggie of brown-sugar crystals, murmured yes, please, yes.

• • •

At the counter, Mom poured thick yellow batter into a greased cake pan, and smoothed the top with the flat end of a pink plastic spatula. She checked the oven temperature, brushed a sweaty strand of hair off her forehead with the knob of her wrist.

Here we go, she said, slipping the cake pan into the oven.

When I looked up, she was rubbing her eyelids with the pads of her fingertips. She blew me a kiss and said she was going to lie down for a little bit. Okay, I nodded. Two birds bickered outside.

The room filled with the smell of warming butter and sugar and lemon and eggs, and at five, the timer buzzed and I pulled out the cake and placed it on the stovetop. The house was quiet. The bowl of icing was right there on the counter, ready to go, and cakes are best when just out of the oven, and I really couldn’t possibly wait, so I reached to the side of the cake pan, to the least obvious part, and pulled off a small warm spongy chunk of deep gold. Iced it all over with chocolate. Popped the whole thing into my mouth.

• • •

My birthday cake was her latest project because it was not from a mix but instead built from scratch—the flour, the baking soda, lemon-flavored because at eight that had been my request; I had developed a strong love for sour. We’d looked through several cookbooks together to find just the right one, and the smell in the kitchen was overpoweringly pleasant. To be clear: the bite I ate was delicious. Warm citrus-baked batter lightness enfolded by cool deep dark swirled sugar.

But the day was darkening outside, and as I finished that first bite, as that first impression faded, I felt a subtle shift inside, an unexpected reaction. As if a sensor, so far buried deep inside me, raised its scope to scan around, alerting my mouth to some- thing new. Because the goodness of the ingredients—the fine chocolate, the freshest lemons—seemed like a cover over something larger and darker, and the taste of what was underneath was beginning to push up from the bite. I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother, tasting a crowded sense of her thinking, a spiral, like I could almost even taste the grit in her jaw that had created the headache that meant she had to take as many aspirins as were necessary, a white dotted line of them in a row on the nightstand like an ellipsis to her comment: I’m just going to lie down. . . . None of it was a bad taste, so much, but there was a kind of lack of wholeness to the flavors that made it taste hollow, like the lemon and chocolate were just surrounding a hollowness. My mother’s able hands had made the cake, and her mind had known how to balance the ingredients, but she was not there, in it. It so scared me that I took a knife from a drawer and cut out a big slice, ruining the circle, because I had to check again right that second, and I put it on a pink-flowered plate and grabbed a napkin from the napkin drawer. My heart was beating fast. I was hoping I’d imagined it—maybe it was a bad lemon? or old sugar?—although I knew, even as I thought it, that what I’d tasted had nothing to do with ingredients—and I flipped on the light and took the plate in the other room to my favorite chair, the one with the orange-striped pattern, and with each bite, I thought—mmm, so good, the best ever, yum—but in each bite: absence, hunger, spiraling, hollows. This cake that my mother had made just for me, her daughter, whom she loved so much I could see her clench her fists from overflow sometimes when I came home from school, and when she would hug me hello I could feel how inadequate the hug was for how much she wanted to give.

I ate the whole piece, desperate to prove myself wrong.

LC Read-Behind-the-Scenes Note: Drop in on this intimate conversation between our managing editor, Allison, and Aimee Bender, who reveals more about cake, surreal meals, and the ability of food to repair our losses—as well as divulging the contents of her refrigerator.

Comments

We love to hear from our readers! Please tell us: Do you have a “particular lemon cake” in your childhood? (It can be a literal or symbolic one.) A cake full of sadness or joy or something altogether different? Let us know by leaving a comment below—even if your particular cake came from a box.

Powerful piece of writing. I can’t pinpoint any particular dish that evokes a reaction of sensing the cook’s emotions, but I sometimes can gauge the mindset of the cook when I eat something–for example, most catered food–soulless and unfeeling; food made by a novice or infrequent cook–a certain hesitancy, a sense of stress or uncertainty; food made by someone who cooks from the heart–a fullness, an assurance of comfort, even love. Am suddenly reminded of the passages in “Like Water for Chocolate” of people reacting to food prepared by Tita.

Anyway–lemon poundcake for me has always been a happy thing :) Sunshine and good times baked into a lovely whole!

Thanks for commenting. And a great allusion to Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. Aimee’s book turns the perspective around, so that instead of many people reacting to food prepared by one person, Rose is one person responding to everything she tastes.

I do think that you can tell when food has been prepared in a bulk, impersonal way, versus something made with love for family or friends.

Michele, thanks for commenting. Glad you liked this excerpt. If you like magical realism, surreal happenings, all with the most piercing layer of emotional honesty underneath—yes, then I’m sure you’ll love Aimee Bender’s other books. If you like short fiction, I definitely recommend Willful Creatures and also Aimee’s “breakout book,” The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Happy reading.

Thanks so much for the book recommendation, Corinne! Matter of fact, I am also a fan of Stephanie Kallos, so I’m glad you mentioned her. Thanks for reading and commenting on “Literary Lunch Break.” Hope to see you back here for more.

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